Changes Afoot

You might notice that LeeAnn’s Punctuated Poetry has become LeeAnn Pickrell ~ Poetry & Prose. I want to open things up, experiment a bit, go bigger instead of smaller. My first instinct is to draw in, hold myself close. But close leads to closed. So I’m challenging myself to step through the opened door and see what happens.

This has been a challenging year, and I found I couldn’t commit to a weekly post each Sunday, so I’ll still post on Sundays, just not every Sunday. I’ll post when I have something I want to share—a poem, a piece of prose, observations, the extraordinary within an ordinary moment. If you’re a new subscriber, welcome. If you’ve been around, thank you for sticking with me.

---

I’ve been thinking about accessibility in poetry. I was in a Conscious Writers Collective class with Bella DeSendi where she talked about accessibility in the language we use in poems. I’ve also read posts on other platforms about how some poetry seems to be written for other poets rather than a more general audience. So where does my poetry fit into this?

Of course I want other poets to like my work; of course I want the admiration and respect of my peers. I can get caught up in this, however, and always end up feeling like I come up short. I’ve actually been feeling quite unsure about my poetry lately so I’ve pulled back from sharing except with my poetry group. Some of this uncertainty could be valid, that I really do need to dig deeper, and some of it could be in my head. Probably it’s a bit of both.

Sometimes I am surprised at what readers discover in my poetry—what I had no idea was there—and I love when that happens. I also want my poetry to reach beyond the poetry community, to my friends and family, to those I know and don’t know who have nothing to do with the literary world. I do see the value in “telling all the truth but tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson wrote in this poem, and I want to learn how to lean into this more when I write.

I also want my poetry to meet people where they are. This past February I was in Santa Cruz and a woman told me her daughter keeps my book of poetry beside her bed. A man told me when he read my book, he read one poem each day as part of his morning routine. These are the gifts that I forget when I’m feeling insecure and not good enough.